AI adoption among Irish SMEs

More than 20% of enterprises in Ireland used AI technologies in 2025, up from over 15% in 2024, according to the Central Statistics Office's most recent Information Society Statistics release.

The exact figure the CSO reports is 20.2% of enterprises using AI "in some capacity" during 2025, based on its Information Society Statistics – Enterprises 2025 survey, published 6 February 2026 (CSO, "Enterprise Use of Artificial Intelligence," Information Society Statistics – Enterprises 2025). That's real, measurable growth (roughly five percentage points in a single year), but it's still a minority of Irish businesses, and the figure changes substantially depending on business size, which is where the more useful story is.

Sharply. CSO figures for 2025 show 57.7% of large enterprises (250+ employees) used AI, compared with 28.6% of medium enterprises and 17.2% of small enterprises (10–49 employees).

Source: CSO, Information Society Statistics – Enterprises 2025, "Artificial Intelligence", published 6 February 2026.

A large Irish business is more than three times as likely to be using AI as a small one. This isn't unique to Ireland: the OECD's own analysis of AI adoption among G7 economies describes "persistent gaps between SMEs and large firms" as a general pattern, driven by four consistent barriers: connectivity, access to data and compute, skills, and finance (OECD, "AI Adoption by Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises," 9 December 2025). But the scale of the Irish gap is worth sitting with: the businesses least likely to have adopted AI are, structurally, the ones with the least spare capacity to spend time working out how. That's the exact audience this whole content pillar is written for.

The most common uses, by a clear margin, are data mining (10.8% of all enterprises) and natural language generation (9.3%), followed by workflow automation or decision support (6.2%).

By stated business purpose, the CSO breaks it down further: 7.8% of enterprises use AI for business administrative processes, 5.4% for marketing and sales, 5.4% for ICT services, 5.4% for R&D and innovation, 4.7% for accounting or financial management, 3.3% for production processes, and 1.5% for logistics (CSO, Information Society Statistics – Enterprises 2025). Administrative processes leading the list (ahead of marketing, ahead of production) lines up closely with the actual work AI employees are being built for: inbox handling, invoice chasing, CRM admin, the recurring paperwork that eats an owner-operator's evening. It's a genuinely useful data point: the most common real-world use of AI in Irish business isn't a novel product feature, it's admin.

Ireland's overall adoption rate (a little over 20%) sits close to the EU average of 20.0% for 2025, putting Ireland roughly in the middle of the pack rather than a clear leader or laggard.

Eurostat's EU-wide figures for 2025 show 20.0% of EU enterprises with 10 or more employees used AI technologies, up from 13.5% in 2024, a jump of 6.5 percentage points across the bloc as a whole (Eurostat, "20% of EU enterprises use AI technologies," 11 December 2025). The leading EU countries by adoption were Denmark (42.0%), Finland (37.8%) and Sweden (35.0%); the lowest were Romania (5.2%), Poland (8.4%) and Bulgaria (8.5%). Ireland's rate sits well clear of the lowest adopters and meaningfully behind the Nordic leaders, a genuinely middling position, growing at a broadly similar pace to the EU average rather than pulling ahead or falling behind it.

The headline "20% of businesses use AI" figure counts any use of any AI technology, which includes fairly light-touch applications like using an off-the-shelf writing tool occasionally. It doesn't distinguish between a business that has one AI feature switched on in existing software and one running AI agents doing ongoing operational work.

This is worth being honest about, because the raw percentage can overstate how embedded AI actually is in most adopting businesses. The CSO's own purpose breakdown is a useful corrective: even among the roughly one-fifth of enterprises counted as "using AI," the most common individual applications (data mining and natural language generation) are broad categories that capture everything from a genuinely operational agent to occasional use of a writing assistant. The OECD's framing is a useful lens here too: it explicitly separates AI adoption by "digital maturity levels, complexity of AI applications, and scope of implementation" rather than treating adoption as binary, precisely because a single adoption percentage flattens a real range from experimentation to genuine operational reliance (OECD, AI Adoption by SMEs, December 2025). Reading the Irish figures with that caveat in mind: a fifth of Irish businesses have some AI use, a smaller subset of those are using it for anything resembling ongoing operational work, and a smaller subset again have anything as structured as a defined AI employee with rules and an escalation boundary. The gap between "used AI" and "AI is doing a real job reliably" is exactly where most of the useful work, and most of the risk of doing it badly, actually sits.

It means being behind the curve is the statistical norm, not an exception: most small Irish businesses (over 80%, per the CSO's small-enterprise figure) haven't adopted AI yet, so there's no meaningful "everyone else is already doing this" pressure to react to, and no shame in a considered, later start.

It also means the size gap is a real, measured barrier, not an excuse: the OECD's four barriers (connectivity, data/compute, skills, finance) map fairly directly onto why a small business without technical staff finds AI adoption harder than a large one with an IT department, and that gap is exactly the reason a managed, built-for-you model exists as an alternative to either doing nothing or trying to configure a general-purpose AI tool without in-house expertise. The administrative-process figures (the most common actual use case in Ireland today) suggest the most useful starting point for most small businesses isn't a flashy AI product feature, but the unglamorous admin work already eating the most time.

If the administrative-process finding above sounds like your business (AI already being used most for the unglamorous admin work), see what an AI employee actually is for how that's different from a general AI tool, or browse the roles we build for concrete examples. If a state grant might offset part of a first step, see AI grants Ireland and the Trading Online Voucher explained for what's genuinely available. Whatever the funding picture, how an AI employee gets built covers what the actual work looks like. If you're weighing whether adopting AI is worth it for a business your size specifically, see the honest comparison, and send a brief when you're ready to talk through a specific job.